On Monday, April 8, Pomona College held a faculty meeting to vote on a resolution regarding the arrests of 20 5C students last Friday. The meeting, which was held in Edmunds Ballroom at Pomona, began at 12 p.m. and lasted for approximately one and a half hours. About 150 voting faculty members and 50 non-voting faculty members were in attendance.
This meeting follows Pomona President Gabrielle G. Starr’s decision to issue interim suspensions — suspensions enacted immediately without the approval of the judicial board — to the Pomona students who were arrested at Friday’s demonstration in Alexander Hall. Starr announced her decision in an April 5 email to faculty members.
“I will issue interim suspensions to any Pomona students who may have been arrested today; indeed I directly informed the individuals in my office that this would be the case,” Starr wrote in the email.
At the time of publication, Pomona is the only 5C college issuing suspensions to its arrested students.
According to Kenneth Wolf, Chair of Faculty at Pomona, Monday’s meeting was centered around a resolution that condemned Starr’s reaction to the demonstration and pushed for the removal of the suspensions on arrested students. The resolution was created by several faculty members and circulated last evening.
“The focus was a resolution written by a number of faculty members decrying what the authors of the resolution regarded as an overreaction on the part of the president (summoning the police),” Wolf said in an email to TSL. “The resolution further called for the removal of the suspension and other restrictions placed on the arrested students.”
Wolf also stated that Starr reached out to faculty members for their input on the situation at around the same time that the resolution was first circulated.
“It should be noted that at almost exactly the same moment last evening [April 7] that the proposal was shared with the faculty via email, we all received an email from the President, asking for faculty input to help her define the conditions under which the affected students would be allowed to resume their classes/get back on campus, etc.,” he said.
Ultimately, Wolf explained, faculty members were not able to vote on the resolution due to “certain irregularities pertaining to Robert’s Rules of Order.” In saying this, he referred to a set of parliamentary procedures that are commonly used for facilitating discussions and governing meetings.
Susan McWilliams Barndt, a professor of Politics at Pomona who attended the meeting, explained that faculty would be reconvening later in the week to finish the discussion and to vote on the resolution.
“For a sort of suspicious set of procedural reasons, it was determined that we were not able to vote on the motion,” she said. “We will be re-adjourning on Thursday.”
Joyce Lu, an associate professor of theatre, was also in attendance at the meeting, which she had to leave early in order to teach a 1:15 p.m. class. Lu expressed her frustration with these reasons.
“There’s a lot of confusion about following policies and whether the movement is legitimate according to the faculty handbook, which is frustrating to me because I feel like blindly following rules is something that the college purportedly encourages critical thinking [about],” Lu said.
She elaborated on this point, questioning the value of the college’s rules.
“[The college is] saying they believe in restorative justice and transformative justice and sustained dialogue, but it feels like people don’t know how to do those things,” she said. “And so they fall back on these rules, but rules are historically made from colonial people who have power and are racist and oppressive. So this is frustrating to me, and I also have to go teach class, and so this drawing out of the issue, so that we’re unable to vote on it — it’s really frustrating to me.”
A special faculty meeting, where members will officially vote on the resolution, will be held on Thursday, April 11.
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